The Columbian, Vancouver, Wash., Greg Jayne column: GREG JAYNE: Short of a boycott, BCS is here to stay

Nov 27, 2008 (The Columbian - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- DIS | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- OK, OK, I get it. You don't like the BCS.

You're not alone.

Pete Carroll doesn't like the BCS. Joe Paterno doesn't like the BCS. Even the President-elect doesn't like the BCS, and his opinion tends to carry some leverage.

But for all the vitriol directed at the system for deciding college football's champion, a couple of salient points often get overlooked. First, there's only one thing you can do to affect change in the BCS. Second, arguments in favor of an eight-team playoff have more holes than the Huskies' defense.

We'll get to those issues in a moment -- after we hear Barack Obama's pitch for a postseason.

"We should be creating a playoff system. I don't know any serious fan of college football who has disagreed with me on this," Obama said in an interview with "60 Minutes," confirming my suspicion that we have never met. "So I'm going to throw my weight around a little bit. I think it's the right thing to do."

Maybe. It's conceivable that Congressional action could lead to change we can believe in. Either that or years of court battles.

On the other hand, right doesn't make might in the world of college football, and perhaps that's what is so confounding for fans.

We'll let ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit explain.

"Here's the problem that nobody wants to talk about: The governing body over March Madness is the NCAA," Herbstreit said during a recent radio interview. "The NCAA doesn't control the BCS. You know who controls the BCS? The conferences. And the conferences get the money. You bring the NCAA in, now everybody's going to get a different split."

And for all the consternation and the rhetoric and the derision, the issue is really that simple. If you want to change the BCS, you need to go directly to the conferences, and the conferences -- at the behest of the university presidents -- have no interest in a playoff.

Just this past May, the BCS conferences rejected a plan for a plus-one format that would effectively create a four-team playoff.

"After a very thorough, very good discussion among the group, we have decided that because we felt at this time the BCS is in an unprecedented state of health yada, yada, yada," BCS head John Swofford bloviated at the time.

Well, he didn't really say, "Yada, yada, yada," but you get the idea.

So, rather than bow to public pressure, the BCS conferences opened up the bidding for TV coverage of the next four-year cycle of games, beginning in 2011. Which brought a Pavlovian response and a bid of $500 million from ESPN.

The irony in this is palpable, considering that ESPN's stable of writers and commentators is filled with card-carrying members of the "I Hate the BCS" Club. And the guess here is that ESPN will not take kindly to criticism of something it just paid a half-billion dollars to televise.

But that shouldn't prevent you from advocating an eight-team playoff. Only common sense can prevent that.

An eight-team playoff this year could include conference champions such as Florida State, Cincinnati and Oregon State. Fine teams all. But do they really deserve a shot at a national championship?

And if you wanted to take the highest-ranked teams for a playoff, well, you would have better luck trying to cure the economy. The all-powerful conferences would never go for it. Would the Big East or the ACC approve of a system that leaves its teams on the sidelines? Not likely.

Look, I can understand the desire for a playoff. Personally, I like the fact that the regular season is vitally important in college football. I like the fact that games in September can be crucial, while college basketball games are utterly insignificant until late February.

But this isn't about me. This is about you, the typical college football fan, and what I can do to help. Consider it a Public Service Announcement.

So while I can understand the desire for a playoff, I don't think the plan has been well thought out. Bowl games are part of the charm of college football, part of the uniqueness.

If your team has a successful season, it is rewarded with a postseason game, and you can actually attend and partake in the festivities. How many fans could afford to travel for three postseason games to watch their team?

Therefore, the only reasonable solution is to blow up the bowls entirely and institute a 32-team playoff, with the first three rounds played on campus rather than neutral sites. That way, fans could actually go to the games, and the higher-ranked teams could be rewarded with home playoff contests.

As great as the opening rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament can be, they often are played out in front of plenty of empty seats. And those teams are trying to fill only a 20,000-seat arena, not a 70,000-seat stadium.

Having early-round playoff games replace the bowls might be great for the people of El Paso, Texas, when Southern California and Florida come to town. But it wouldn't be great for Trojan and Gator fans who might be anticipating a second-round game in, say, Detroit, followed by a championship game in, say, New Orleans.

That speaks to the unique nature of college football. For the fan in the stadium, it provides the grandest experience of any sport. A playoff would offer a TV bonanza, but it would diminish the importance of regular-season games, and it would financially lock out the typical fan who follows their team throughout the year.

The Lords of the Realm in college football point to TV ratings and attendance and suggest that the sport is more popular than ever. They provide numerous reasons for avoiding a playoff -- including the laughable and disingenuous one about players missing class time.

Which brings us to the one thing you can do to promote a playoff for college football.

You can boycott the sport.

You can stop watching games on TV. You can stop going to games in person.

Until you do that, until you begin speaking with your pocketbook, the university presidents have no reason to care about you not liking the BCS.

Greg Jayne is Sports editor of The Columbian. He can be reached at 360-735-4531, or by e-mail at greg.jayne@columbian.com. To read his blog, go to columbian.com/section/GregJayne

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